Reducing The State Of Homelessness

Best Solutions Combine Public, Private Efforts

July 15, 1990|By ALAN A. DIAMONSTEIN

IN THE PAST three years, Virginia has taken unparalleled strides to address myriad housing challenges.

The Virginia Housing Partnership Fund has been recapitalized for the 1991-92 biennium at $49 million. The fund was established in 1988 by the Virginia General Assembly on recommendation of the Virginia Housing Study Commission and was initially capitalized at $47.5 million.

The Virginia Housing Development Authority established its $45 million Virginia Housing Fund using bond reserves.

The General Assembly has passed legislation, suggested by the Housing Study Commission, designed to stimulate the preservation and production of affordable housing for every Virginian.

As a result of such carefully crafted and exciting ventures, other states now look to the commonwealth as a national model of creative state response to critical housing issues.

Why this concern over affordable housing? Why this significant investment of state tax and lottery dollars to address housing issues? And what is affordable housing, anyway?

In 1987, the newly-reactivated Housing Study Commission - an 11-member legislative study commission - convened a series of regional public hearings, work sessions and walking tours around Virginia. The commission concluded that year that the commonwealth faced nothing less than a crisis in affordable housing.

Housing needs in the state are no longer the exclusive province of the elderly, the physically and mentally disabled and the under-educated poor. Homeless shelters increasingly are occupied by two wage-earner families and their children, unable to find affordable housing. And even though emergency shelters for the homeless have changed their guidelines to provide for longer stays by clients, they nearly always operate at full capacity, with the result that more and more wage-earners must resort to living on the streets, in their cars, under bridges, or in abandoned, condemned buildings.

While homelessness is the most visible and chilling evidence of housing needs, other problems exist, as well. Easily one-third of the hard-working families in Virginia cannot afford to purchase a home. In rural areas - and, yes, right outside our city limits and, in some cases, in pockets inside city borders - some 79,000 Virginia households live without adequate indoor plumbing.

Our state also has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and those units - many of them occupied by elderly and disabled residents living on $330 per month in disability benefits - are literally falling down.

Virginia's housing needs are not unique; they mirror problems faced by other jurisdictions across the country. Nationally, then, what factors have combined to cause the housing crisis we face?

From 1981 to 1989, the federal government cut housing appropriations by 80 percent, leaving states and localities, together with the private sector and non-profit organizations, scrambling to fill the gap. In addition, while changes in the federal tax code substantially diminished incentives for producing affordable housing, the federal government reduced the authority of states to issue tax-exempt bonds used to develop affordable housing.

IT IS IRONIC that in Virginia - the sixth fastest growing state in the nation - many residents find themselves in a position now more tenuous than the one in which they were balanced prior to the extraordinary economic growth most of us have so readily embraced. Indeed, as distressing as housing problems may be from a social services vantage, they are equally disturbing from a standpoint of economic growth and development.

The reciprocal relationships among a strong regional economy, the availability of affordable housing, and the vitality of the housing industry have become increasingly evident. High housing costs affect both employer and employee, and adequate affordable housing can be a significant factor in a corporate decision to locate, expand, or relocate in a particular region.

Throughout the "urban crescent" that curves down from northern Virginia through Richmond and into the Hampton Roads area, service workers who earn minimum wage are in short supply. Is housing in our area "affordable" to them? Consider these numbers.

A full-time worker earning the new federal minimum wage rate that went into effect April 1 earns $3.80 per hour, $152 per week, and about $608 per month, before taxes and Social Security deductions. According to the Virginia Coalition for the Homeless, the average three-bedroom apartment in the state last year rented for $600 per month. Even if this hypothetical wage earner were married and his or her spouse also earned minimum wage, they would be unable to qualify to rent an average three-bedroom apartment. Generally, rental agreements prohibit a tenant from spending more than one-third of total income on rent.